European national science academies urge further action on climate change adaptation

The complex interactions between floods and society are currently being investigated at TU Wien. The economy needs the central government to organise flood protection.

Sudan, the world’s last remaining male northern white rhino, has died at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya — pushing the species even closer to extinction after decades of poaching. Just two females of the subspecies remain alive today, Sudan’s daughter and granddaughter.

As many as 153 million premature deaths linked to air pollution could be avoided worldwide this century if governments speed up their timetable for reducing fossil fuel emissions, a new Duke University-led study finds.

The Colonial Pipeline, which carries fuel from Texas to New York, ruptured last fall, dumping a quarter-million gallon of gas in rural Alabama. By the time the leak was detected during routine inspection, vapors from released gasoline were so strong they prevented pipeline repair for days. Now, scientists are developing technology that would alert pipeline managers about leaks as soon as failure begins, avoiding the environmental disasters and fuel distribution disruptions resulting from pipeline leaks.

Environmental policy guided by science saves lives, money, and ecosystems. So, reports a team of eleven senior researchers in Environmental Science & Policy. Using air pollution in the United States as a case study, they highlight the success of cleanup strategies backed by long-term environmental monitoring.  

They might seem like unlikely allies, but ranchers and prairie conservationists have a future working together.

More than a decade after beekeepers first raised the alarm about a dangerously low global bee population, much progress has been made in understanding the mystery of colony collapse.

The impacts of global warming are felt especially in mountainous regions, where the rise in temperatures is above average, affecting both glacierized landscapes and water resources. The repercussions of these changes are manifold and varied, from retreating glaciers to an increase in the frequency and intensity of snow avalanches. A team of researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, has employed dendrochronology– the reconstruction of past disasters as recorded in growth series of trees– to disentangle the role of global warming in the triggering avalanches. The results of this study are published in the Proceedings of the National Academic of Science – PNAS.

A new study by scientists from WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) and other groups predicts that the effects of climate change will severely impact the Albertine Rift, one of Africa’s most biodiverse regions and a place not normally associated with global warming.